I recommend either Toast 7, which will compress DVDs to fit on a single-layer DVD-R, or DVD2OneX, which does the same but slightly faster, while allowing you to select exactly what you want to compress, and save it to your HDD.

Ripping movies to MPEG4 at 2200 bitrate; dual-pass encoding. Works out to about 1 GB/hour. Movies look as good as the original.

Just watched the Incredibles, and it was perfect. Hardly any artifacting, that I could tell. (And there is some fairly fast action in that animated film...)

Thanks!

cb

ps: hey, Kiwi, how's the weather down there? Just heading toward autumn, eh? We visited Auckland in Nov '04, and fell in love with the place. Stayed in Devonport, and drove up to Ahipara through the Mangamukas. My kid barfed all over the car. It was great!

ps: hey, Kiwi, how's the weather down there? Just heading toward autumn, eh? We visited Auckland in Nov '04, and fell in love with the place. Stayed in Devonport, and drove up to Ahipara through the Mangamukas. My kid barfed all over the car. It was great!

Yep, summer's nearly over. I'm in Wellington so it gets a bit stormy this time of year... the odd breezy day.

Next time you come get away from Auckland and actually see NZ - you'll love it!

there are alot of people talking about storage issues. but and external case for ATA or SATA hd's and then buy the hd's to put in them when ever you find a good deal and use a firewire or usb2.0 connector. i would assume usb2.0 can pass the data fast enough. i use mine for music only and i dont use any compression when i rip cds, i only rip to wav or for ease of use i use .iso files and just have the files needed on every drive to sey up any computer to have a virtual drive that will mount the iso images and read the file as if it was inserted in an optical drive. so my question is what combination of software would allow complete dvd backup to a file format that appears as a whole dvd to software for playback or is there an image file and software to create a virtual drive to point dvd player software to for playback.

jeremyh wrote:

Right. I think this has been mentioned before but no matter what you do, DVDs are already compressed AND lower res that most HDTVs anyway so they're never going to be super crisp and you will almost always going to see artifacting.

My point is that your kids won't care. At least mine don't...and it doesn't require them or me fishing around (and eventually scratching) DVDs. Just go to the movies folder using FrontRow and voila!

It won't be until you see hi-def DVD that you'll get a really clean picture. It will still be compressed, but you should see far less artifacting and the imagery should be stunning. If you think archiving standard-def DVDs requires huge amounts of HD space, wait until the high-def stuff comes out. Ouch!